Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

You have probably heard of Soylent, the liquid meal replacement where you can conveniently get all your balanced nutrients by just drinking liquid Silicon Valley. I mean, you've already outsourced all your other chores to my fellow startups–don't you want to save another two hours per day and eliminate all superfluities?

No? Yes? Well, it's not for everyone, but I sure would like more time for my important stuff, and I've already eaten food tons of times. Plus, if I can have my default meal be a healthy one, I'll sacrifice extra tastiness (which is why I don't eat dessert). I'm in. Forget eating! Yet...

I like Soylent, but it takes a lot of trust in nutrition science to say, "Let's just combine a bunch of individual micronutrients that match the recommended daily allowances, since those are exactly what all humans need, right?" Never mind that some of the RDAs were established by a handful of weak studies–you still have to believe that not only did we get the nutrient levels right, but that those nutrients are all you need, and that they work in isolation, in the specific forms that are included in your Science Drink (which may not be bioavailable or bioequivalent).

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Baby Max is four months old today. I posted when he was one month, talking about what a difficult little demon he was, but after eight weeks he magically changed overnight into the sweetest baby ever! We were so surprised the first time he slept 7.5 hours straight instead of waking up every 3 hours, we kept waking up anyway just to go stare at him. "Maybe there's something wrong with him!" But he kept doing it, and now he sleeps from around 8pm to 4:30am every night, wakes up to feed, then goes back to sleep until around 7:30am. It is amazing. And where before he cried a lot, always seemed unhappy, and didn't even know how to smile, now he generally loves everything and will smile his head off if you just look at him.

Here are some more surprises from the first four months of Max.

1. He loves "reading" books.

I had thought that before he could read or understand words, or even be able to visually recognize cartoons of things, he would get bored when I read to him. But even from the beginning, books held his attention and excited him. Thanks for all the books, everyone (but especially Mom)!

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been two years since The Motivation Hacker came out, so here's another updated graph of ebook sales by platform including the second year. (See also First Year Book Sales, Aftermath: The Motivation Hacker, and Fourth Year Book Sales)

Sales again have fallen off more slowly than I expected, although it's finally getting quiet now, down to about two sales a day in March. In total, it's up to 4102 copies, or around 60x how many I was expecting. Cool!

Total reviews climbed from 124 to 275, and sentiment ebbed from 4.5 stars on Amazon to 4.4, and from 3.90 to 3.85 on Goodreads.

At $2.99, I've kept the book as cheap as possible while still in Amazon's 70% royalty split bucket, and I did similarly with the new CreateSpace paperback ($7.99). The total royalties are around $9065.42, bringing my effective hourly rate up to $43.31.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

When I was a kid, I didn't work. I got a tiny allowance ($5 per week, or maybe per month), and every now and then I'd age or undergo a holiday, so friendly relatives would send me money. But the only things I wanted to buy were desktop computer parts and video games, and I easily saved enough money for those. Parents took care of everything else–thanks parents!

Later, I was a college student. Sometimes I wanted to buy Chinese food, but that's about it; I still had roughly no spending. (Apart from how expensive school was, but again, I mooched from parents and scholarships–thanks parents!). Still, I felt like I should earn money, so first I worked as a dishwasher for around $8 an hour, and then as an inept ResEd student web developer for maybe $9.50 an hour. Suddenly the savings I had slowly built from that $5 per week allowance seemed meaningless.

Still feeling like I should be doing something career-related, I nepotised into a co-op preprofessional software engineer summer job at IBM. (Thanks Dad!) That was $20 an hour, full-time, with overtime even! After a few months of that, I came back to that student web developer job and realized I didn't care about it at all–I'd written more than my share of abominable Perl forms, and with $13,000 in my bank account, why would I want to get paid $9.50 an hour to write more of them when I had better things to do? I helped them hire a younger minion and lounged around on my coins. The money I had made from the web developer job also never mattered.

After college, George, Scott, and I started Skritter, and apart from rent ($300/mo) and food ($6/day), I had a few other small expenses (lasers, bowie knives, whips, etc.), but really, life was cheap. Skritter survived at first off of the entrepreneurship grant our school gave us (more mooching). I was finally glad I had made some money at IBM, because those savings kept me out of debt until Skritter could slowly become profitable. I could also calculate utility and buy a few things, like a sick office chair and some large computer monitors–they were like like three cents per hour of use!

Across several years of working on Skritter and moves to Costa Rica, Pittsburgh, and Sunnyvale, revenues grew, but my spending habits didn't change–I was still living like a kid who occasionally needed to eat something or upgrade his computer. If I had to buy something, I'd buy the cheap thing—I mean, you gotta save money, right?

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

It's that time again where I become a better person. Help me out, would ya? Follow this link to give me anonymous admonishments:

http://www.admonymous.com/nick

Tell me what I suck at, or if I treated you poorly, or if noticed me not being awesome when I could have been. But don't include personally identifying details, so I don't know it's you! (Well, you can if you really want–I promise I will appreciate instead of resenting anything you tell me.)

Even if you don't have any admonishments because of my stunning perfection, you can still troll me; that'd be fun, right?

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

But instead of writing those, I'm just working really hard (alongside Scott, George, Matt, Michael, our artists and designers, and our open source contributors) on CodeCombat, which is getting really good as we get close to December's Hour of Code and the completion of our new beginner learn-to-code offering and iPad app. This is fun, but it doesn't leave much time for cool, effortful blog posts. So here's a quick one saying what's up, since a friend mentioned that it is hard to tell what I'm doing when I don't say what I'm doing.

Besides hacking, Chloe and I (and CodeCombat) moved into a sweet new apartment/office which is actually big enough for both purposes instead of too small for either. It's still in San Francisco, in SoMa, right next to the ball park. It was surreal and amusing to watch the riots going on outside our window when the local baseball team won the global baseball tournament.

Skritter is continuing to do well in the hands of its team, whereas George, Scott, and I are happily obsolete. The guys released an Android app last month.

I'm eating a lot of MealSquares, and they are still great, saving me a ton of time. Try a box.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

There's a thought experiment people use when they think about possible future technologies like teleportation and cryonics and brain uploading, about going into a teleportation machine that copies you and deletes the original. Is it still you? What if the original isn't deleted–are both you? Or if you get your brain reconstructed in two hundreds years after you die–still you? Or if you transition your brain from decaying organic matter to a machine that reproduces it exactly?

Turns out that yes, duh, it's still you (except maybe in that last case; creepy story!). Even if there is a time delay in the teleportation, or even if the copy isn't deleted. Which one is the original? They both are.

So sure, use the teleporter or become a computer, whatever. What I actually want to write about is what you would do if you could actually make a copy of yourself, right now. In this hypothetical scenario, no one else can do it, and it doesn't cost anything, just five minutes. I'll call them clones, but they're not babies–they have all of your experiences up until the moment of copying. And I'll call you the original, but you might as well think of it as becoming the copy yourself, because there is no original/copy–there are just two of you now (and let's say the cloning machine spins, so you can't even tell which one "was" the original). You can make as many as you want, and your clones can make clones.

Would you do it, and if so, how would you deal with becoming multiple?

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Someone posted this on Facebook, having captured me on my urban walk to work. Amidst discussion of how someone could have possibly married me and how I can be inside a restaurant with no shoes and which other crazy people don't wear shoes and the inexorable hippie onslaught and just what is that on my back, Chloe (who, as it turns out, is friends with said someone) notices:

Then there was a flurry of posts saying how this thread is what Facebook is made for and how something great/terrible has happened for social media this day. I was amused. I feel like I've really connected with the OP now, whereas when I saw her in the burrito place, she was just another NPC to me as we each quietly strummed our phones waiting for Mexican food and moments with familiar faces.